The Artist’s Secret is that all art comes from abnormal brains. So if you create art that satisfies your own tastes, you have created for a market of exactly one abnormal person. If you’re lucky, a handful of other freaks get some joy from your creations too. But it won’t be enough to pay your bills. It’s not a career until you learn to create products that normal people like.

The wonders of evolution are far more subtle and far more fascinating than the coarse fabrications of those repositories of the ignorants called sacred texts; forgivable 2000 years ago as a means of trying to understand our physical environment, but quite inexcusable today.

I was trying to get out of it at every stage. No one was watching it and I’m superficial in that way. I wish I could say I knew this was great, important work but I didn’t care. I wanted lots of people to watch it and I wanted to win awards.

Bill [Nelson] is one of the four artists whose fan club I ever was member of and Bill’s Acquitted by Mirrors (a lot of the original content now available online) was excellent — with free vinyl EPs and a good magazine containing writing and artwork by Bill. The three others (as if you were interested) — Durutti Column’s “subscription” service, John Foxx’s “The Service” (both shortliving failures — but I’ll gladly hand over fifteen quid anytime to keep Vini going) and The Cramps’ Legion of the Cramped (which was brilliantly run from Scotland by Lindsay Hutton).

The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages — locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back — so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.”

You do not need to be a grammarian to know that you do not fight wars against common nouns but against personal ones. You fight a war against this or that country or enemy. Wars on drugs, wars on poverty, wars on waste - all these things are idle if grandiose ways of describing doomed political ventures.

Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring [ice-hockey player] Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasise that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I will follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.”

This collapse is likely to be profitable for one fund manager who has for decades made a point of sticking to his own fundamental notions of value: the American billionaire Warren Buffett. His great mentor was Benjamin Graham, an influential American investor whose key insight was that, on the stock market, there is a deceptively simple duality. Graham called this the Class One versus the Class Two truth. A Class One Truth is a sober assessment of a company’s objective worth at a point in time: the figure you get after you add up the value of its property, cash and other assets, then subtract its debts. A Class Two Truth, by contrast, is based on external factors such as emotion, fashion and herd instinct: it is ‘true’ only for as long as we continue to believe in it, just as a designer handbag is only worth £5,000 if people think so. When there is a discrepancy between the two types of truth on the stock markets, there is a chance to make money.

With shows like The Wire and Dexter there are no more cookie-cutter characters about. It just won’t be accepted any more; the audience is too sophisticated. I really think we’re in another golden age of television right now; the quality and standard of work is much higher than it has been in the past couple of decades.

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read, before you were tapped for this, to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN true quotes, folks : I ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press for the media, I mean…

COURIC: Like what ones specifically? I m curious that you…

PALIN: Um, all of em, any of em that um have been in front of me over all these years, um…

The path to contentment is well signposted but generally points in the opposite direction to where we want to travel. Instead we rush off getting everything we want and then realise we don’t need any of it. A quicker way to contentment is to realise you don’t need any of the things you think you want before spending 40 years trying to acquire them.

One of the many drawbacks of working here is that I see far fewer points of interest during the day about which I can write. My journey time is shorter. It mainly involves travelling in the City. City people are boring and predictable. You can tell that they are boring and predictable because they wear loud expensive shirts from TM Lewin or Hawes & Curtis to shout “look at me I’m not boring or predictable” Er, yes you are. Now, please return to Fenchurch Street or Liverpool Street for your train to Billericay or Chelmsford.

When I was a Booker judge myself a few years ago, I had to study his contender, Shalimar the Clown, closely. Did I, on finally giving one of his novels full attention, find myself converted? ‘Fraid not. I slogged through, a militant opponent of every page. I found the overloaded sentences and overbearing manner insufferable. And I didn’t believe a word of it, which never helps.

Now it seems that I have been proved an ass once more, by popular vote, no less. But this Booker of Bookers was an odd affair. A panel of judges first selected a shortlist of six, leaving off such genuinely popular titles as The Life of Pi and The Remains of the Day. Then just that six were put to the vote. Even with online voting and considerable publicity, only 7,800 people bothered to choose the inevitable winner. So, not that popular a vote.

It has come because of the failure of two older ideas. The first was post-war, top-down, bureaucratic paternalism - still, bizarrely, kept alive, if only just, by Gordon Brown’s wretched regime. This depended on the economics of John Maynard Keynes and assumed that, ultimately, clever people in the government knew best. The second was neo-liberalism, the cult of the free market that, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, became the orthodoxy of the West. This depended on the economics of Milton Friedman and assumed that, ultimately, people, through the workings of the market, knew best. Both had their successes and both failed. With Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein have written the textbook of the Third Way.

This third way precisely splits the difference. They call it libertarian paternalism. This means there should always be freedom of choice but there should also be nudges in the direction of doing the right thing.

…

But it’s interesting stuff, you might think. Unfortunately, if you read the book you will change your mind. Although snappily packaged with its one-word title to get into the same market sector as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, it is a very, very dull read, a dogged march through social policies with boring lists of what nudges should be imposed and how.